Reviewer Gordon Osmond : Gordon is a produced and
award-winning playwright and author of: So You Think You Know English--A Guide to English for Those Who
Think They Don't Need One,Wet Firecrackers--The
Unauthorized Autobiography of Gordon Osmondand his debut novel
Slipping on Stardust.

He has reviewed books and
stageplays for http://CurtainUp.com and for the Bertha Klausner
International Literary Agency. He is a graduate of Columbia College
and Columbia Law School and practiced law on Wall Street for many
years before concentrating on writing fiction and non-fiction. You
can find out more about Gordon by clicking
HERE

An undisputed pioneer in
the development of American motion pictures, C.B. DeMille has
understandably been the subject of numerous biographies and other
works seeking to expose and explore the fascinating presence that,
when he was not engaged in his principal occupations, dabbled on
screen by treating Norma Desmond with kid gloves in Sunset Boulevard
(directed not by DeMille but by Billy Wilder—a pairing I’d surely
like to hear more about) and by providing an oddly appropriate
gravel-voiced off-screen narration to DeMille’s blockbuster film,
The Greatest Show on Earth. The latter film won an Oscar; the former
should have, at least for Gloria Swanson as the delusional Norma.

Author Hammond is
therefore in ample company in his fascination with this legendary
director. According to notes accompanying Ready When You Are, Hammond
has produced a novel, an epic biopic, and a screenplay about DeMille.

Ready When You Are is part
self-help advisory, part collection of articles by and about DeMille,
and part printed trailer for Hammond’s other works on the subject.

The self-help part of the
book, actually its centerpiece, is based on DeMille’s signature
film, The Ten Commandments. The commandments are: be humble, amazed,
ready, wise, steadfast, courageous, spectacular, visionary, truthful,
and generous. Though a bit more general than God’s, these
commandments are fairly unassailable advisories. The value of the
short chapters that describe them lies not so much in their titular
mandatory injunctions, but rather in the anecdotes about DeMille that
accompany them.

The ones I found most
fascinating were those that told of DeMille’s assistance to other
trade members, from the newbie Ayn Rand to the majestic but fading
Edward G. Robinson, how he dealt with the highly suspect dryness of
the ocean floor during the parting of the Red Sea, and the
imagination he used in conquering hard props like leopards and hard
lighting conditions like shadows in the desert.

Other parts of the book
provide valuable insights into DeMille’s tenets of directing, from
the importance of theme and getting actors to give it a thought as
well as the inadvisability of overly explicit instruction to actors.

It would be unfair to
expect a legendary director to be a whiz at writing, and the few
excerpts from DeMille’s own articles do nothing to question this
premise. There’s a fair amount of “important,” “interesting,”
and “very, very” around. One passage is repeated verbatim in a
later section of the book, and there are other instances of editorial
inattention.

However,
if one is looking for a Reader’s Digest glimpse into the genius
that guided Hollywood for decades, you’ll no doubt enjoy and be
ready when C.B. DeMille is.